Latency and energy in quality-driven applications for networked wireless devices

As smartphones, tablets, and other portable technologies become increasingly prevalent, scaling computational applications to run on these resource-constrained devices will continue to rise to the forefront of challenges in the wireless networking community. In particular, computing tasks which typically address a trade-off between robustness and efficiency, including emerging methods for intruder detection, cryptography, and context-aware applications, need to balance these two objectives against power to adequately transfer onto small systems with a limited power supply. In this paper, we present a queueing model that explicitly balances the competing objectives of minimizing latency, maximizing output quality, while regulating power consumption. We demonstrate the efficacy of this model against a sensible alternative heuristic, thus providing a general and integrated framework for evaluating the performance of quality-driven applications on resource-constrained devices.